


My Equal in All Things

by Star_Crow



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Family Feels, Future Fic, Wedding Fluff, canonverse, wedding vows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-11-06 08:53:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11032857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Star_Crow/pseuds/Star_Crow
Summary: No one would ever doubt Bellamy Blake's bravery. Those first days after landing, Mount Weather, A.L.I.E, Priamfaya. He was the epitome of endurance and courage. And yet, it had taken him nearly twenty years to ask the girl he loved to marry him.





	My Equal in All Things

“Dad?”

Bellamy looked up from the floor, squinting in the orange light of the setting sun, glaring down on them. Selene sat beside him, the train of her coat draped over the wall. 

This was the daughter Bellamy knew. Her dark hair woven into Grounder braids halfway along her scalp, before falling loose in soft waves down her back. The crescent tattoo around her left eye stood out like a rose in a patch of weeds, inky black against her golden skin. The deeper slices on her face had been stitched. The shallower ones had been left open to heal themselves. The paint was mostly gone, but Bellamy could still see the faint silhouettes of her war markings. He figured she could, too. She had showered and scrubbed a thousand times since she’d make it back home but the shadows were still there.

Bellamy raised an eyebrow as he waited for her question.

She folded her hands in her lap. “Why didn’t you and Mom ever get married?” she asked finally.

He thought for a moment, before turning his eyes to the remnants of Skaikru, hurrying about their daily lives. His answer was short. The truth, of course, but only a simple version.

“It was never a priority.”

The young woman winced as she shifted her weight. When Bellamy had carried her into medbay, she’d looked more like a corpse than his child. Cut, torn, broken, and covered in mostly her own black blood. Bellamy had cried. He couldn’t help it. It was the epitome of everything that he’d fought to avoid. Clarke was stronger. She had to be. Aurora was dead. Jackson was MIA. Abby’s hands were shaking too much. It had taken her hours to mend the worst of her injuries. Selene’s shattered bones in her leg were bound in a cast from the femur to ankle. The stab wound above her pelvis had taken Clarke hours to stitch it up. It would take even longer for what was beneath the surface to mend.  
There was nothing Clarke could do about the bruises.

Selene’s forehead crinkled as she frowned. “How was it not important to you? Marriage-”

“Means nothing.” He shook his head. “We were saving the world. And then suddenly, it didn’t need us to save it anymore. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We talked about it. We were going to do it. I got Abby’s permission. Kane agreed to officiate it. Then,” Bellamy trailed off. 

Selene quirked a dark eyebrow. “Then what?”

In this light, it was hard to tell, but Selene thought her father was blushing. “I got your mother pregnant.”

“Aurora was an accident?” She let out an airy chuckle. “Well, now it’s all coming out.”

Bellamy grinned at her over his shoulder, shaking his head. “You were the only one we planned, kid.”

“So Aurora ruined your wedding?”

Bellamy smirked as he took a swig of his bottle. “Yep. Once Aurora was around, getting married wasn’t exactly high up on our to-do list. Then when we had a bit more time, we wanted a sibling for her. Besides, it was already a marriage. Making it official wouldn’t have changed a thing.”

Father and daughter turned their eyes up. Perhaps fifty metres away stood Clarke Griffin, bouncing her baby son on her hip. Bellamy had always thought Clarke was beautiful, as had Selene, but age suited her especially well. She was nearly forty-two now. Her blonde hair was cropped just above her shoulders, ruffling gently in the summer breeze. It had taken on a sheen in the last few years, like spun silver. The stoniness of her young face had softened. This was the Clarke that Bellamy remembered before everything had happened, the woman she always had been on the inside.

“Do you know why I fought that trial? Why I became the Commander?” Selene asked abruptly.

Bellamy watched his partner as she debriefed the builders from their day of digging. “To avenge your sister. Protect your clan.”

“You’re right. I did it for Aurora. I did it because I wanted peace for Skaikru. I wanted to watch them die for what they did and I wanted to be the one to do it,” she said softly, keeping her eyes on her mother. “But I also did it for us. So Noah could grow up happy. So you and Mom could have time for the little things.”

Bellamy shifted his gaze to his eldest living child. His stomach was swirling, with what he couldn’t tell. “You think now is the time?”

“Like you said, it’s always been time,” Selene shrugged, a knowing smile curving her lips. “It’s up to you.”

When he’d been younger, when they were still fighting, Bellamy had stopped on more than one occasion to imagine his idyllic future. He hadn’t seen Aurora, Selene, or Noah. He had seen himself marrying Clarke. Fantasized about it, even. A meadow full of flowers on a beautiful summer’s day. Clarke in a white dress with her hair braided like it used to be, with all their friends gathered around happy and smiling. It was never going to go down like that. Half the people in that vision were long dead. Jasper, Monroe, Lincoln, Sinclair, Maya, Fox, Wells, even his own mother. Octavia wouldn’t be there either. She was alive, but he didn’t know where.

At the end of the day, when his back was against the wall, the only person he had ever counted on was Clarke.

Bellamy set his jaw.

“Hand me that flower, kid.”

Selene turned to see a wildflower growing beside her from the Earth. It was a beautiful thing, a brilliant purple cornflower, the sunlight making the veins appear. It was almost a shame to pluck it. 

What Selene didn’t expect to happen next was for Bellamy to reach inside of his jacket. Selene heard the chink of metal before he revealed a silver chain. On it hung two rings. They were fairly plain, functional, just like they had been back on the Ark. 

“You were planning this all along?” Selene hissed, her eyes wide.

Bellamy shook his head, unfastening the chain to free the smaller of the rings. “I’ve had these since I was seven years old. They belonged to my grandparents. They died before I was born. My mother gave them to me. She said she wouldn’t need them but that I might someday.”

He checked that Clarke wasn’t watching then held the woman’s ring up to the sky, the one small gemstone glistening in the sun. “Since we canceled the wedding plans before, I’ve sort of kept them as a good luck charm.”

“You carried your wedding rings around with you for nearly twenty years for good luck?” Selene stared at her father incredulously. “I knew you were hung up on it.”

Bellamy gave her a mock scowl. “How can I be hung up on the mother of my own children?”

“I don’t know but evidently you’ve managed it pretty well.”

Selene sighed. Their hands brushed as she passed him the bloom. “Make it count.”

Bellamy smirked as slipped off of the wall. “I always do.”

He straightened his jacket when his boots touched the ground, cupping his hands over his mouth as he turned away from Selene.

“Clarke Griffin!”

His yell traveled the length of the camp, like the primal call of an animal. It sang to Clarke and beyond. People halted in their paths at the outburst. 

No matter how much he might protest, Bellamy Blake cut a strong figure in the camp. He had a lot going for him. Commander of the Guard, a Councilman, Clarke Griffin’s lover, virtual son-in-law of the Chancellor. Hell, there was even talk of him being Chancellor himself one day. Besides that, he had saved every single ass in Arkadia a few times over. He was their hero and he commanded their respect as such. Their admiration was a bonus.

They all stumbled out of the way as Bellamy marched past at a blinding pace. Clarke stood stock still at the gate as even the builders backed away to form a semi-circle around her. It seemed that it was only Noah that wasn’t frozen, squealing excitedly and reaching out his arms as his father approached.

The moment when Bellamy reached them seemed to be almost surreal to Selene, a second paused in time, as everyone watched and waited with stomachs clenched in anticipation. It loosened when Bellamy slowly sunk to his knees in the mud before her, like a gasp of fresh air after drowning. Clarke’s eyes were misty, from both disbelief and what looked like unshed tears. As if she could barely believe what she was seeing. She didn’t even seem to notice when Raven quietly took Noah from her arms.

“Clarke,” Bellamy swallowed, holding the flower up to her and the ring in his palm like an offering. “I would start by telling you how long I’ve loved you, but I don’t know when I started. All I can say is that when you turned your back on me after Mount Weather, that was it. That was when I knew that I was in love with you, that the only place I wanted to be was by your side. Just you and me, screw everyone else. I got that. I got to be your partner, your best friend, the father of your son and your two beautiful daughters.”

He struggled to continue as he swallowed the lump in his throat. “I’m sorry I couldn’t protect Aurora for you. That was my job and I failed.”

“Bellamy-”

Selene could not tear her eyes away, even when Kane came to help her down from the wall. 

“We have spent our whole lives sacrificing our own desires to be the leaders. It’s who we are. I know that. It’s never going to change, but if my life were to end tomorrow, I would want to die knowing that you were mine.”

For once in her life, Clarke had the right words to say as Selene heard her mother whisper. “I am. I am yours.”

Bellamy took a deep breath in and summoned every last dredge of courage. “Then marry me. Right now. No more waiting around.”

Every member of the gathered crowd seemed to be holding their breaths again. The question of a Bellamy and Clarke wedding had been a subject long bandied about and much wanted like a public holiday. The possibility had faded as the years went on but never died. The anticipation had always been there.

With Kane as her crutch, Selene limped through the crowd who parted for her like Moses’ Red Sea. 

“I promised over eighteen years ago that I would officiate your marriage,” Kane shared a hopeful look with Selene. “You’ll find no shortage of witnesses here.”

Raven smiled as Noah cooed at her, tugging the end of her ponytail roughly. “All you gotta do is tell the poor man yes, Griffin.”

Still folded on the ground, the sudden rush of adrenaline was wearing off for Bellamy. A nervous edge was creeping into his eyes, not daring to look at anyone except Clarke. Clarke was fixated on him, too, staring straight into his dark irises. 

She said yes. As if she were ever going to say anything else.

They were married for the setting of the sun. On the paper, Bellamy signed his name Bellamy Griffin-Blake. Clarke did the same. 

Bellamy was right. It didn’t really make much difference. The family name Griffin-Blake had always been their custom, the one that their children had gone by without question. In the way that Clarke was a part of Bellamy and he was a part of her.  
It did, however, give Skaikru an excuse to celebrate. Even in their peacetime, they still struggled to find occasions worthy of revelry. Revelry was a good word for what happened that night. They drank far too much and danced both slow and fast. Friends, old and new, sat down and swapped stories. The children played. They laughed, every single one of them. Selene wished her sister was there to see it.

Bellamy and Clarke slunk off at some time past midnight, hand-in-hand as they disappeared into the night. She and Noah would sleep somewhere else tonight, perhaps with Abby and Marcus. Her mother had squeezed her hand, stroked the off-black locks at the nape of her son’s neck. Her father had kissed her forehead and the back of Noah’s head. Selene watched them go as her brother snoozed on her shoulder.

With her free hand, as she watched the rest of the ex-delinquents celebrate, she wrote down the vows she’d heard them speak. 

“I, Clarke Griffin, take you, Bellamy Blake, to be my lawfully wedded husband. These vows are my privileges, not promises. I freely give you all I have to offer. I vow to be your lover, your companion, and your best friend. I will celebrate your triumphs and love you through your failures as if they were my own. May my heart be your shelter and my arms your home. I promise you my world and all its wonders. So long as I shall live, I will be with you. You will never walk alone. To have and to hold, from this day forward. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part. This is my solemn vow to you, Bellamy, my equal in all things.”

“I, Bellamy Blake, take you, Clarke Griffin, to be my lawfully wedded wife. I choose you to be my partner for life, although just one lifetime with you could never be enough. I offer every piece of myself in return. I ask you to walk this path with me hand-in-hand. I vow not just to grow old together, but to grow together. I will love you faithfully through the difficult and the easy. I will be there, whatever may come to haunt us. I give you my life to keep. Your love is my anchor and your trust is my strength. To have and to hold, from this day forward. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part. This is my solemn vow to you, Clarke, my equal in all things.”


End file.
